5 Live Chat Operator Best Practices

Written By: admin | Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2010

Your live chat operators are often at the front lines of your business. They can provide the first (and last) interaction your customers have. Whether they are providing sales or customer support, your live chat operators should leave a lasting, positive impression. Here are five best practices for operators to ensure they’re doing just that.

Approach a chat like you would a phone call, not an Instant Message. While one of the huge advantages of live chat is the ability to quickly and efficiently assist multiple customers at the same time, you still want each customer to feel like they have your undivided attention, just like they would if they were talking to you on the phone. Answer promptly and greet your visitor, preferably by name. If it will take a few minutes to pull up their account or order or look up the information they are requesting, let them know instead of leaving them hanging. If you are using a canned message and part of the message doesn’t apply to the customer, edit the message before you send it. (Nothing is worse than being at the receiving end of an obviously scripted message.) And remember, while you want the chat to be friendly and helpful, it’s not the same as IMing your friends. Stay professional and avoid any typical instant messaging abbreviations (LOL, BRB, etc.).

Ask permission. If you’d like to utilize the push page feature to “push” a visitor’s browser to a specific page of your website, ask first. If you want to launch an Active Assist session, ask. Even though the visitor will be prompted to give permission to begin the session, make sure it’s something they are comfortable with before taking that step. For some customers, live chat may be an entirely new frontier. Ensure that their first experience is a positive one.

Use BoldChat to help you multi-task. Organize the BoldChat grid using the Group-by and Column Chooser options. Pop out chats into individual windows when managing more than one chat at a time using the View feature. Set up the one-click greeting option so you can automatically greet your visitors when you click the Answer button. Set up hot keys for canned messages. With so much flexibility and so many different ways to configure BoldChat to fit the way you work, helping multiple website visitors gets easier and easier. If you haven’t attended our Getting Started with BoldChat webinar series (dates and times are regularly posted on the BoldChat home tab), be sure to sign up for the next session and get more out of your BoldChat experience.

Send an image before you send a hyperlink or a push page. Whenever appropriate, insert an image into your chat, either by using the insert image button and entering the image URL or by dragging and dropping images into your chats. Keep the visitor engaged in the chat instead of pushing them somewhere else. Plus, the visitor can request an email transcript at the end of the chat and save the images for future reference.

Enable the post-chat survey. Nothing can boost operator morale like positive feedback from customers. Sure, the post-chat survey provides supervisors with a great tool for measuring operator performance, but it also lets operators see how they’re doing. Add the survey fields to the BoldChat grid using the Column Chooser and operators can review the survey results as soon as the chat ends. It’s a proactive way of improving your chat implementation, one chat at a time.